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weather tag

Answer: San Diego

Remember that time I thought Low Gap was cold? That night the temperature got down to 28 degrees (obviously Fahrenheit, Centigrade can suck it). Cold enough to have me in my sleeping bag by 7:30pm. Cold enough to frost my rain fly. Cold enough to make sleeping as unlikely as being at a Gilbert Godfrey book reading.

Compared to tonight- however- merely a mild chill. It’s 7:40pm at Cold Spring Shelter – and already the temperature is down to 33 degrees. There’s a total of 12 people in the shelter’s vicinity and exactly zero of them are not within three feet of the oversized fire or tucked in their sleeping bags. I opted for the latter- I’m a comfy bastard like that.

And of the ~2,000 people on the trail this year, no one is more ill equipped than Whoop and Badger.

Previous to my 2.5 year San Diego stay- I did 18 in the upper Midwest . Anything over 50 degrees was shorts weather (fact). San Diego has turned me into a softy. And I’m not alone- 63 degrees in San Diego translates to a sweatshirt and pants for anyone aside from tourists (cargo shorts are a double giveaway). My acceptable temperature window narrowed to a range of 68 – 76; 77 was too hot, 67, too cold.

Now I’m living in an environment where you can experience four season in 48 hours.

4.1.11

Mother nature pulled a great April Fools Joke on us. Last night’s low got down to 14. Suck. It.

You may be wondering what one wears in weather like that..?

Everything.

Every damn article of clothing in my pack was on my frosty body. Then the procedure calls to wrap your mummy bag around your head and eagerly await sunrise so the idea of unthawing can start to replace all of the four letter words working their way through your brain.

Silver Lining #1: the extra level of chill didn’t actually seem worse than the Low Gap frost. I think I’m shedding my San Diego skin (that’s good because my Wisconsin skin is made of beer, cheese, and brats- a much better insulator).

In my previous post, I laid out the “how to“ portion of my “moving to San Diego” series. The following will serve as the “why”.The previous post also included a sense of humility and an understanding that San Diego is not a one-size-fit-all city. This post will be having none of that.

If forced to describe the Good Badger in 3 words, the general consensus would undoubtedly arrive at: noble, nimble, and ninjitsu (click that). I bring this up simply to point out that “embellishing” is not one of those terms. I pride myself in being a fact-spewing truthbot. So, when I make a claim such as, “San Diego makes every other city in the Universe look like Detroit”, you know that it’s as good as encyclopedic.

Likely you’re already aware that San Diego has great weather, nice beaches, good looking people, etc. I’m not here to restate the obvious. Instead the below will serve as 3 (and a half) “outside the box” reasons